


beyond all rivers tides the sea

by JPlash



Category: X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom
Genre: 1973, M/M, Post-Movie, Some Plot, Some feels, some porn, some snark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-23
Updated: 2014-05-23
Packaged: 2018-01-26 05:44:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1676891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JPlash/pseuds/JPlash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>[DoFP Spoilers inside :)]</p><p>Sometimes, they are so angry at one another that Charles struggles to keep his fury contained and Erik knows the world is as cruel as it has ever been.</p><p>That is the flow of the river perhaps, the pull of the tide, whichever way go the ripples; or perhaps something simpler, a byproduct of the the tiny clotting fears that accumulate in the cracks and then on the skin of the world.</p><p>Sometimes, they still can't leave each other behind.</p><p>(i.e. Charles and Erik catch up on the years before Erik went to prison, then make up for lost time)</p>
            </blockquote>





	beyond all rivers tides the sea

**Author's Note:**

> Charles's face on the plane when Erik says the assassination wasn't him needed a fic <3

“Fancy a game?”

Charles nearly has a bloody heart attack.

Erik is floating in his window. Charles’s chess pieces are levitating. It is—Charles has no idea what time it is. He was sleeping.

He takes a moment to glower, and tries to think of an appropriately scathing response.

Erik lands on the sill, crouches, then climbs through into the room.

Charles pushes himself up to sitting. He needs to invest in plastic locks for the windows. “It’s rude to break into people’s bedrooms.”

“You sent a child to break into mine.”

Charles raises an eyebrow.

“Young Peter. At the Pentagon.”

Charles doesn’t smile, but he does laugh, sort of; rubs his eyes with one hand. “What are you doing here, Erik?”

“Visiting an old friend.”

He’s wearing the helmet though not, thankfully, the cape.

If he weren't wearing the helmet, Charles thinks he just might turn Erik right back around and send him out the window. Instead, he waves a hand at the seat by the table. There’s only one; his own has wheels.

"You crushed me under a giant girder and left me there. You tried to kill my sister, and Hank. You would have had us at war. You make a poor friend, Erik."

By the time Charles manoeuvres himself out of bed and into the wheelchair, there is a single black pawn out of its regimental line-up.

Erik always takes the first move.

*

“Was I right to break you out?”

Erik moves his bishop; Charles raises an eyebrow, waits for an answer.

“We prevented Trask from taking your sister.”

Charles nods once, takes a pawn. “You’re right. I should ask: was I right not to put you back in?”

“I’d be dead.”

“Probably.”

“You’d never forgive yourself.”

It is always so difficult to look away from Erik.

Charles moves a rook. “Tell me what happened in Dallas.”

Erik doesn’t look down at the board. “Kennedy? I told you.”

“Convince me.”

Charles’ eyes are very blue, narrowed a little, his lips pursed. The full force of his attention. It’s an order, full of days and nights a lifetime ago when Erik needed Charles to separate his past and his present, to hold his mind and his power together, but it’s also, perhaps more so, a plea.

*

“Why don’t you ask me to take it off?”

There are a cluster of pieces surrendered each side of the board; it is always like this, neither giving the game his full attention.

“Because you won’t.”

“Or because you think I might if it’s my idea. I almost left it in Washington, I was so afraid you'd stop me.”

Charles’s grimace is insufferable and gorgeous as ever. “You give me too much credit for this hour of the night, my friend. Or is it morning?”

“Morning,” Erik confirms. “And no one has ever given you too much credit.”

*

“Win the game and you can take it off.”

Charles looks up sharply—truly surprised, more than he was to see Erik in the window. “Why?”

Erik grimaces himself, wry. “Because I want to show you, at least as much as I don’t.”

*

Charles takes the king with exam-morning first-date cliff-edge vertigo jitters.

Erik nods slowly. “Remember, Charles: you would not like me as your puppet.”

For the first time, Charles smiles, the way Erik hasn’t seen in a long time—coy, powerful, almost but never quite cruel. “Really? I might.”

Erik stands as he meets his eye; pulls the chair out and around the table, sits again, closer, the chess board no longer between them.

Charles chuckles briefly. “Then, you’d kill me the moment my focus slipped.”

“Probably.” Almost certainly.

Charles gives Erik a moment to remove the helmet himself, in case, but neither of them is wont to misspeak. Charles leans in, raises both hands, and Erik doesn’t flinch as the ugly thing slides off over his ears, and he doesn’t close his eyes.

*

Erik’s mind is an awful place—even when Charles has found it beautiful, it has always been that.

He says—not truly asks, because he doesn’t care how Erik answers, but says, because it is the easiest way to summon the key truths of the thing—“Did you kill him, Erik?”

And in Erik’s mind is the truth.

*

Before he talks, Charles sifts—sinks—reacquaints himself. Tries to begin to process in his own mind the things he finds in Erik’s. It would be easy to get lost here, always has been; too easy to start trying to soothe the sharp edges, easier still to sink fighting the desire to do so.

When he does speak, Charles says: “You spent ten years in solitary confinement for a crime you didn’t commit.”

“I’ve spent most of my life in solitary confinement for crimes I didn’t commit. Or for no crime at all.”

"You cannot dismiss it so easily. Ten years in a stone box."

"Did DC look like I'd dismissed it, to you?"

"You're not well, Erik. No one could be, at this point."

Erik's smile is thin.

"It serves, I suppose, as time served in advance for the people you killed in DC. One of those girders that hit me killed a man, someone you've never met. Another died later from wounds inflicted when you fired on the crowd."

"They were gathered to celebrate the start of a genocide."

The sheer conviction in Erik's mind is hard to swim against. It would be easier if it weren't true. Charles shakes his head. "You don't know who they were or why they were there. But as I said." Charles draws himself back a little; he has seen enough for a lifetime of Erik's terror of genocide. "Ten years alone in a concrete box. It's more than a lot of people serve for two murders."

Erik is ready for a heartbeat to argue, tensed both body and mind—and then he looks at Charles—the sight of his face through Erik's eyes, god—and it falls away. It's not Charles at whom he's angry. He's tired, Charles realises. They're both tired. "You're satisfied, then? You were right to release me."

Charles hums quietly. “In Dallas, you did kill two agents.”

“They attacked me.”

“Before that…you were gathering information.”

“I know.”

“Yes, I—” Charles smiles a little, nothing in it, for once. “I’m confirming.”

“Mm.”

Charles’s fingers are at Erik’s temples; Erik knows they really don’t need to be, but it’s habit, and it’s touch.

“You weren’t killing former SS officers, as you were before. And you weren’t killing CIA operatives.”

“Emma told me you’d already taken care of some strategic memory loss.”

“Murder is rarely the best answer.”

“They got her. They’re still coming for us.”

“For you. Not for all of us.”

“Perhaps.”

Charles opens his eyes. He doesn’t drop his hands. “You weren’t killing anyone?”

Erik’s lips quirk mostly despite him. “I’ve been in prison for ten years, Charles.”

“Before that.”

“I was busy.”

“Gathering information.”

“And mutants.”

“Yes. I can see that.”

Erik’s hands are on his knees.

Charles drops his slowly. “You hadn’t killed anyone, until last month.”

Erik looks unimpressed. “I’ve killed more people than I know the names of.”

“Yes, I—since you—left me, in Cuba, I mean.”

“I didn’t leave you, Charles. You didn’t want to come with me.”

“You didn’t want to stay with me.”

“You know that’s not true.”

“But you wanted other things more.”

The helmet is on the table, with the chess board, the hateful promise that nothing lasts forever—Charles fights the niggling urge to toss it at the fireplace, as though Erik wouldn’t simply snatch it out of the air. Not to mention that it’s almost certainly fire-retardant, and that the grate’s in the way.

“You haven’t killed anyone. Except the two agents in Dallas, and the two innocents in DC last month.”

Erik snorts at 'innocents', but he frowns. “I’m not sure.”

Incredulity sits well on Charles.

“You’re asking about ten years ago, Charles. Nothing springs to mind. I knocked a lot of guards insensible, but there's no reason any of them should have died. I don’t remember any particularly deadly scuffles. You can sort through the memories of that year if you like.”

For a moment, Charles looks as though he might try. “You don’t mind having me in there?”

“I never minded you looking.” The rest of the answer is implicit.

*

"You'll believe me one day, Erik. We'll all be together. I saw it. You and I, old, properly old, side by side."

Erik's gaze is always hard, but he almost smiles, a bit. "You didn't give me back to them to die. I'll believe it's possible."

"And you didn't kill anyone from the day you left me to the day you—tried to kill my sister. Still." Charles eyes the pieces left on the board—looks back to Erik—looks back to his own hands in his lap. "No one in those years...and I always assumed—when—in '63—I assumed you'd been cutting people down since the moment you left."

"Don't forget I dropped a steel rig on you last month. And I killed those agents in Dallas."

"The ones who stopped you saving Kennedy?" Charles knows he's impossibly wide-eyed again, but it's such a surreally, gloriously beautiful and all at once terrifying thing to know. He shakes his head once—it doesn't clear. Erik dropped a bloody metal frame on him, and he tried to kill Hank and Raven, but he's still Erik. "They attacked you."

*

Charles kisses as he always has, as he did the first time and the last, with dedication and his thick sense of entitlement, with terrifying generosity and absolute certainty, with a hand on Erik’s cheek and a quiet voice in his head.

*

Erik needs control like he needs air, takes it with as little thought; Charles holds onto control with the compulsive grip of a child who feared everything and could protect nothing—has never managed to stop. Erik’s fingers on Charles’ jaw, his palm curling around his throat, are never tight but always firm, and it’s eleven years since anyone’s touched Charles with his mind unleashed.

“Can you—without your—drugs…?”

And Charles seizes Erik’s left hand from the arm of the wheelchair and—“Not if you’d struck me an inch lower,” he growls, but the words move against Erik’s lips, and Charles presses the captive hand between his own legs, eloquently demonstrative, and shameless, and greedy, and perfect.

Erik is clumsy with the button but the zip obeys him, no fabric component, and he presses in perhaps too hard, just to feel the heat and the hardness as Charles gasps a laugh or laughs a gasp and, “Lift me from the chair, Erik.”

*

For Erik to hold Charles against him, hip to hip is, if not impossible, not comfortable for either, with Charles’s legs out of service; he settles for carrying Charles to the bed bridal style, lowers him with a gentleness that Charles teases, then crawls over him with an economy of movement that shuts Charles up. A lifetime ago, Charles admitted to finding it oddly comforting, the weight, the size of Erik over him, braced either side, all around like closing out the world, mind wide open with the promise of nothing to fear. Pressing him into the bed like this, chest to hip, the low snarl of possession in Erik’s gut and chest and mind and straight to his cock is dangerous as ever and starving like coming home.

*

Erik wants to fuck Charles like he wants to kill Trask but he has never allowed himself to slip that way, never allowed the violence in him to spill too far into his bed, and right now he doesn’t know enough of Charles’s changed body, what he can feel, whether he could snap a bone or dislocate a hip without feeling it until the blood flooded to the surface, and he still loves Charles, never claimed to stop loving Charles, loves him too much to be careless.

He kisses Charles hard, pulls back to spit in his right hand, wraps it around both their cocks, as far as possible, shifts his hips again with a groan to let Charles get a hand in too. It’s a crap rhythm because Charles can’t really move his hips and can barely reach with his hand but Erik’s got it, got enough power to thrust along Charles’s cock for both of them, hips and hand and Charles’s skin beneath his mouth wherever he can reach and Charles is making strangled sighs of noises, free hand tight in Erik’s hair and his scalp will ache when this is done, and it’s not enough, it’ll never be enough but it’s everything they have, Charles’s mind out of practice open like a wound, Erik grunting low with each thrust, and Charles is clinging, hand slipping, giving up on keeping up and just clutching between them, chest bowing up toward Erik, keening, heat and sound and motion, and Erik’s hand on his cock and Erik’s cock and Erik’s broad chest over him and Erik’s hand faster and Erik nips at his collarbone, hard, at the meat of his chest, hard, at his throat, and Erik thrusts like he could go all day and Charles shudders and it’s surreal, disembodying, the failure of his hips to buck against the weight of his legs but then it’s shooting up his spine and it doesn’t lessen it a bit, the full body muscle deep mind open shudder into Erik like the soul leaving the body, like the bottom of the ocean and the top of the sky, like the whole of Erik, mind and body, never being gone.

*

Erik wraps a hand around Charles’s forearm, tugs it over to his own chest because letting go is unthinkable; kisses Charles’s wrist because it’s impossible not to, with it right there; traces his left hand through the bodily fluids messing Charles’s stomach, his hips, because Erik has always preferred wrath to greed but he has never been able to stop coveting Charles.

It is dangerous, this; Charles could so quietly persuade him out of things that must be done, if he let him. No helmet can protect him from that.

When their skin has begun to cool to the fire heat of the room, when their breath has steadied, Erik retrieves bowl and cloth and water from down the hall, returns in silence, washes Charles clean before himself, sweat and semen and the beginnings of bruises. Then he wraps around Charles because letting go is still unthinkable; lets his leg claim one of Charles’s because Charles can’t feel the weight anyway; lays his arm across Charles’s chest because he can.

He doesn’t sleep; neither does Charles.

Charles kisses his shoulder, the curve of his bicep, the edge of his back, once, twice, again. He doesn’t plead with Erik to stay, or ask, which would be the same thing. The things he has to say were said ten years ago—eleven.

Erik goes out the window, at the edge of dawn. Charles kisses him goodbye.

**Author's Note:**

> In my mind this is the same universe as my XMFC story Golden, because that's my head canon for Charles and Erik...but this definitely isn't part of my 'never regrets' 'verse lol (even though Golden is in theory the start of that 'verse).


End file.
